news_&_discussion@webmail

Sometimes spammers will forge the From address to be an address that is known to you so that the message appears to come from someone you know. This is particularly common when the friend has had their email account or address book compromised by a spammer, who is then sending spam to everyone in that person's address book.

If you are getting messages like this in your Inbox, you can turn off the Positive Whitelisting feature. That feature is described in this post.

Just change the setting to NO if you don't want spammy messages from (apparent) known senders to end up in your Inbox.

Users often ask how to navigate quickly to a page in the middle of their message list when they have hundreds of messages saved. It can be tedious to keep clicking Next, Next...

Currently we don't have a "jump-to-page" feature, but there are a couple of shortcuts you can take. You can increase your messages-per-page setting in Preferences, from the default of 20 to as high as 200. That might solve the problem, but know that over dialup the pages will be slower. Broadband users should all just set this to 200.

You can also use a trick to sort of have a jump-to-page feature. After you have navigated to the second page in your message list, look at the URL displayed in your browser and you will see something like "?start=101" and the number will be in increments of your messages-per-page setting, plus 1, referencing the first message on that particular page. So you can just type over that and hit enter to go to a particular page. In my example, the messages-per-page is set to 100, so I could type 101, 201, 301, etc to jump to any page. The page indicator shows you how many pages you have, so if have 20 pages of 100 messages (2000 messages saved), and you want to jump to the middle, you could enter "start=1001" to go directly to the middle page.

Some users have reported that messages they want to receive in their Inbox are sometimes being flagged as spam and going to the Known Spam folder. This is called a "false positive" when our spam filters mark a message as spam but you don't consider it to be spam and want it to be delivered. There are several reasons this can happen. I'll describe some of those and then describe a solution you can use to help us reduce the number of false positives.

Some common causes of false positives are:

You have signed up for a mailing list or announcements from a bulk email sender (a company or organization), but many other users are reporting messages from that sender as spam using the "This Is Spam" button in Web Mail. When a sender has a bad reputation as reported by thousands of users, this can result in their messages being filtered for all users.

A person that you correspond with may have a compromised computer that has become infected with a virus created by a spammer, and their computer is sending out thousands of messages unknown to that user. When that happens, that sender can get listed as a spammer and all their messages might start getting flagged as spam.

In a few cases, regular message correspondence that is not spam might be incorrectly flagged because it has similarities to actual spam and gets caught by a filter. Your reports help to refine the filters to be more accurate.

If messages that you want to receive are being flagged as spam, please follow these steps and we'll try to get it cleared up:

Currently when Internet Explorer users compose an HTML message in Web Mail, the Return (Enter) key on the keyboard inserts a paragraph space instead of a single line feed. You are using HTML compose (as opposed to plain text) by default when replying to an HTML message, or if you have started a new message and selected "Color & Graphics" on that screen. This allows formatting the text in your message.

The "doublespace" problem has been reported by a number of users and we intend to get it fixed soon. In the meantime there are a couple of things you can do. The best solution may be to use the Enter key only when you want a new paragraph, and otherwise just allow the compose window to wrap your text automatically as you type. Then it will be single-spaced. Any email viewer your recipient is using is going to wrap the text for them too.

If you need to insert a single line feed, a couple of clever users pointed out on this blog that you can do so by pressing Shift-Enter instead of just the Enter key. That will put in a regular line break instead of a new paragraph. Incidentally, it isn't actually "double-spacing" as some have referred to the problem; if there were simply two line feeds you could backspace off one of them. You can't. It is actually an HTML paragraph tag being inserted.

As far as we know the problem does not occur on other browsers, just Internet Explorer. But it will be fixed soon.

A lot of users have asked about saving or copying messages from Web Mail to their computer, particularly the Sent copies that are in Web Mail. Some users want to know how to just save a single message as a file (which is easy to do) and others want to know how to move messages in bulk just to free up their online storage space. We can do that too.

There are several ways to accomplish this, but first it is important to understand the difference between accessing your mailbox via Web Mail, or via any other email software like Outlook Express, EarthLink Mailbox, Apple Mail, etc. The two main advantages of using Web Mail are that you can access your mailbox from any browser on any computer, and you don't have to install or configure any software. All messages are stored on the server and you just view them using your browser. With any email software installed on your computer (called POP software or a POP client) you are downloading the messages to your own computer hard drive, and then viewing and managing the local copies on your own computer. Some advantages of this are that you can view or compose messages while offline, and your storage space is only limited by the size of your hard drives.

When you use both Web Mail and other email software, understand that the only folder in Web Mail that is accessible by your other email software is the Inbox. This isn't a limitation created by EarthLink; it is just how the POP protocol works with all email software. POP software (Outlook, etc.) has no concept of online folders, and can only download messages from the online Inbox to your computer. Then once you have the messages on your computer, obviously you can sort and store them in local folders.

If you aren't completely clear on how Web Mail and other email software access your mailbox differently and how they can work together if you use both, then please read this FAQ for more information. It's essential to understand that part first.

Web Mail currently limits you to adding three file attachments to a message, using the three entry boxes at the bottom of the compose view. We are working on updating that feature to remove this limitation. In the meantime, user Jack Sweitzer has come up with a very clever way to work around the limit, that doesn't require using zip files (as I've suggested before).

Someone asked, on Dec 5, 2007: "Can't you remove the 3 attachment limit on the "write message" dialog box? This is a real nuisance. I often need to include more attachments!"

Until this is changed, I found a way around it. First, post your three attachments in the boxes provided, and then save to Draft. Next, re-open your draft message . . . your three attachments will show above as attachments, and your three boxes for adding attachments will be empty, allowing you to add three more. Continue until all your attachments are added. I recently did it for 10. The only problem is, if the sequence of attachments is important, you'll need to add them in reverse order; that is, say you have 9 items to attach: start with #7-9, then 4-6, then 1-3.

We're working on making the import feature more robust and easier to use, and particularly on providing more helpful error messages when things go wrong. In the meantime, if you are having trouble then the suggestions at the link above may help.

Users ask for help saving their email address or password on the login page, or help removing a saved email address or password on the login page.

First understand that in addition to the "Remember My Email Login" checkbox feature on the Web Mail login page, your browser also has a form autocomplete feature, and the difference between the two can sometimes be confusing. Your browser has the ability to save all form entries including passwords. Web Mail will never save your password, and only has the option to save your email address.

Leaving the browser feature aside for the moment, here's how the Remember Me feature on the login page works. When you check that option, your email address will be pre-loaded in the login box next time you visit the page. If it isn't working, there are two possible causes:

You are blocking or deleting cookies. The only way Web Mail can save this email address for you is by saving a cookie in your browser. You must allow cookies for earthlink.net to be saved. If you subsequently delete all your browser cookies, the saved email address will be lost.

You may be using an incorrect URL (browser address) to go to Web Mail. You must alway use only "webmail.earthlink.net" for your login page in order for the email address to be remembered. If you are a hosting customer, the correct URL is "webmail.hosting.earthlink.net".

Once you have saved your email address by using the checkbox on the login page, you can remove it simply by unchecking the box, and logging in to Web Mail.

This post is a variation on the "Where Did My Messages Go" article I published a while back, as it warrants publishing again. Also, in an upcoming release of Web Mail, a proactive explanation similar to this is going to be incorporated into the First Time User dialog that comes up the very first time you log in to Web Mail, to try and head off this confusion and make sure users understand it when they begin using Web Mail.

Note: everywhere below that I refer to Outlook or Outlook Express, that applies to any email software you have installed on your computer whether it is EarthLink Mailbox, Eudora, Thunderbird, etc. They are all POP3 email clients and all work the same way.)

In the Web Mail Feedback mailbox (click the Feedback link inside Web Mail), one of the most common sources of questions continues to be users who get confused about the difference between Web Mail and other email software like Outlook Express or EarthLink Mailbox. The questions usually take the form of "Why were my messages deleted without my permission?" or "Why did my messages just disappear while I was using Web Mail?" and they often use much more aggressive language than that. These users are frustrated or angry because they don't understand what happened. Then the next time they go into their other email software, their "lost" messages magically appear. Then we get another round of questions with the theme of "Why do my messages go to my Outlook Express, I want them to go to Web Mail?" or "How come I can get my messages in my Outlook at work but then I can't see them when I'm at home?"

This article is going to answer all of those questions, and when we get them in the Feedback mailbox, I'm going to just refer the user to this article.

Users ask how they can delete all the messages in their Inbox (or other folder) without having to do them one at a time, or 20 at a time (default page size).

Click the Folders link on the left, and on that page you can delete all the messages in any folder with one click. Deleting from that page does NOT move messages to the Trash, it deletes them permanently, so use it carefully.

You can also change the messages-per-page setting under Preferences / Web Mail Options and set it as high as 200. Then select all messages on a page at once by using the topmost checkbox. If there is one you want to leave alone, just uncheck it. You can delete or move all checked messages at one time. Note that a higher messages-per-page setting will result in slower loading.

In my earlier post about using the Blocked Sender list, user Eli Polonsky gave us a terrific trick about how to effectively block spam from foreign domains that you would never get any real email from anyway. Here's his tip:

To the person who asked about blocking foreign domains, there is a way that you can block a good deal of them without using up many of your 500 alloted blocks. Here's the hint: if you enter the two last dotted suffixes into your block list, it will block all e-mails with those two last suffixes. For example, if you block co.uk, it will block all e-mails from all domains that end in co.uk. It won't work if you just enter the last suffix (just entering uk won't work), but the last two does work.

For some reason Internet Explorer (see UPDATE below about Netscape) is unique among browsers in having an annoying popup warning box anytime a web page viewed over a secure HTTPS connection contains any content that is not secure. It can be triggered by an image in an email message, or an advertisement on the page, which obviously presents no security risk. If you've ever seen this popup you know what I mean:

*** This image is part of this post, not a real popup. Clicking won't make it go away. ***

In Web Mail some users choose the option under "Preferences / Web Mail Options" to use a Secure Session. If you are seeing the mixed content warning, then you have changed this setting. This option is handy for users who are on shared local networks with other users, or on a wireless connection, and don't want their browser traffic (and email) to be susceptible to snooping by a clever hacker. The secure session encrypts the connection to the Web Mail server and protects the content to and from your browser. Users not in one of these scenarios don't have much real use for this setting, other than perhaps a feeling of increased security (usually a misconception), at the expense of slightly lowered performance. That's why we default it to Off. (Note that the login page is always secure to protect you).